Apologies if a thread like this has appeared before, but I thought it would be interesting to hear people’s takes on this.
For me it would be the use of “staff” as a countable noun meaning “employee”, as in “A large number of staffs work at my father’s company.” I’ve seen this everywhere from official statistics to casual conversations, and it annoys me to no end. IT’S A COLLECTIVE NOUN, FOR GOD’S SAKE. Makes me wish I had more grammar polices to enforce the correct usage.
That can’t seriously be the one error you would change, can it? For me it would be run-on sentences.
EDIT: No, it would be verb tense.
EDIT: No, it would be pretty much everything.
I meant more along the lines of small but annoying things, you know, just to see what other people have noticed. I like your edits, though. 
Your/You’re
It makes my eyes bleed…
[quote=“Blaquesmith”]Your/You’re
It makes my eyes bleed…[/quote]
That’s a native English speaker error like there/their/they’re. It comes from a combination of stupidity, arrogance, and laziness.
Is this a thread about common mistakes native English speakers make, OP? I assumed that we were discussing the Taiwanese.
[quote=“tomthorne”][quote=“Blaquesmith”]Your/You’re
It makes my eyes bleed…[/quote]
That’s a native English speaker error like there/their/they’re. It comes from a combination of stupidity, arrogance, and laziness.
Is this a thread about common mistakes native English speakers make, OP? I assumed that we were discussing the Taiwanese.[/quote]
I meant mistakes that you see in Taiwan, but feel free to rant about native speaker errors as well. 
Another type of error I’ve noticed is the way people confuse -ed with -ing, as in bored vs. boring, interested vs. interesting, etc. Lu Guangzhong (盧廣仲, whose English name is, awesomely, Crowd Lu) even has a song called “Boring” in which he screams “I’m so boring, I’m so boring now!” I think he means bored. 
Speaking of boring, you know how 無聊 is used in ways that can’t be translated as “boring” in English? Like if you make a bad joke or silly remark, your friend will say 你好無聊！I’ve never been able to think of a good English equivalent of that. Off topic, I know, but oh well.
It’s hard to pick just one, but perhaps arrogance, respect for royalty, and trying to claim foreign lands as their own would be up there near the top.
The misuse of apostrophe’s.
“silly” seems to work in the right contexts.
EDIT: Also, “get a life”.
The past perfect is the one I’d fix, because people here just don’t seem to know when to use it. All too often, they use it when the simple past is called for.
Mute point versus moot point.
Is it incapable of speaking or is it just a settled discussion?
“silly” seems to work in the right contexts.
The past perfect is the one I’d fix, because people here just don’t seem to know when to use it. All too often, they use it when the simple past is called for.[/quote]
My ABC kids would use “you are stupid”.
Another hard grammatical word order thing for non-native speakers is when a question is asked that involves a subordinate clause. I think most high school students learned this in English class, but in real speaking it is really hard. My wife with 30 years of English often makes this mistake.
In a question, the word order is reversed. “How are you?” Verb appears before the subject pronoun.
In a question that involves a subordinate clause. The word order of the main clause stays reversed, but the subordinate clause should be back to the normal order. “Do you know what time it is?” — this often is said by non-native speakers as “Do you know what time is it?”
If I ask my Taiwanese wife an either/or question such as…Do you want A or B? The answer is typically “yes”. Apparently, this means “B” as though she is responding only to the second choice. Confuses the heck out of me. Is this a carryover from the structure of Chinese language?
The word ‘or’ in English actually has more senses than in Chinese. Examples are like these:
"Do you want beef noodle, or chicken noodle? "
This one is clear. This one is translated as “还是”
“Can you stop playing the video game now, or I will take away your PS3?”
This one is often difficult for Chinese to understand, and it is not related to Chinese ''还是" at all. This is translated into Chinese as “否则”
I think your wife might have misunderstood you and thought about the 2nd meaning of ‘or’. You may need to make it very clear when you meant the 1st meaning.
Stop Brits from swearing so much.
Stop them from assuming that fahking London is the only place in the fahking country, and that beyond fahking White City the fahking Dark Continent begins.
EDIT: FAHK! That pisses me off!
Punting on the River Cam. Sorry, but you look like twats.
I would mandate that English be written in IPA so that no one had to learn all of those spelling exceptions.
This.
This one is so annoying. I get this at home, and in class, and cannot get them to understand that yes isn’t an acceptable response. I gave you A OR B… pick one! Yes tells me nothing!
Margaret Thatcher.
These are the three factors that made Britain great.